1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a computer implemented method, data processing system, and computer program product for locating a name registry. More specifically, the present invention relates to locating a name registry responsive to a user'sa context or log-in environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Users of networked computers use a system of internet protocol addresses to route traffic from a computer, for example, a client computer, to a recipient computer, for example, a server. Internet protocol (IP) addresses, as used in Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4), use four fields of digits, each from 0-255, to establish the IP address of a computer or other networked device. Such addresses are 32 bits long, and are typically indicated in dotted-octet notation, for example 192.168.0.1. Even longer addresses are anticipated when Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is implemented. Such IP addresses under the IPv6 scheme have 128 bits to identify each computer or device.
The IP addressing system presents IP addresses that are as many as 12 digits long under the current system. To simplify user access to servers across the internet, the domain name service (DNS) was created. In essence, DNS is administered by providing DNS servers that provide tables that match an IP address to a textual address that includes letters. Accordingly, simple domain names have been made possible for use in advertising to encourage people to later surf to websites hosted at IP addresses. Some examples of domain names include ibm.com, google.com, his.ph, del.icio.us, among others. As can be seen, relatively few characters can be used at a browser, or in other contexts, and a DNS server does the mentally taxing work of locating the applicable server IP address associated with the given domain name.
Private networks can host a number of servers. For organizations with tens of thousands of employees, such servers may be private, in that the administrating organization chooses not to publish a universal resource identifier'sa (URI) correspondence to the IP address of the server. As a result, a public DNS server would not necessarily have a table entry or row that provides an IP address to the given private URI. Thus, a user of such an URI cannot reach the private URI without either a) entering the IP address directly to a browser address field; or b) changing the DNS server that, by default, is used by a browser to resolve IP addresses. In other words, a typical arrangement of a primary DNS server and a secondary DNS server can fail to resolve a privately hosted URI.